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Pope takes another shot at wingnuts posing as Christians

If he keeps this shit up, there’s a surely a Teaparty lunatic backed by a creepy zillionaire ready to primary the Pope. Update: I realize his words are vague as shit. But they’ve been being widely interpreted, rightly or wrongly, as urging Christians to cool it on the negative social issue stuff and look more toward helping the poor, the sick, that more Jesus-y stuff.

Comments

I smell nothing but brown air here. For starters, this Pope didn’t even specify WHICH “ideology” is bad here. We can lull ourselves into believing he’s criticizing right-wing ideologues, but the right-wingers can just as plausibly believe he’s continuing JP-II’s attack on “liberation theology” and other liberal/progressive ideologies. And blaming “lack of prayer” just means he’s determined NOT to offer any actual leadership or response.

This guy is nothing but a mealy-mouthed manipulator, pretending to say something without committing himself to anything. How the fuck can anyone take this little tool seriously?

Raging Bee @1 says it well. All I heard was a bunch of meaningless word salad. Until he presents some objective standard against which we can judge when “faith becomes ideology” or a way to measure how much prayer is too little then this tells us nothing other than what we want to hear.

Leo, here’s what I think Frankie is saying: the Church is trying to push its backward, misogynistic, authoritarian con-game into law wherever it can; but when Christians object to it and try to change such policies, that’s “faith becoming ideology” and causing strife and division. The right-wing Church is doing its job by providing doctrinal guidance; Christians who disagree with said guidance are the ones who are causing division, so they’re the ones who have to shut up and pray more sincerely instead.

Basically, the Church has accomplished its mission of purging itself of liberal dissent; so now it can pretend it’s improving by not talking about its political injustices anymore.

I agree with Raging Bee, though I will admit this is a positive sign. It’s just such a teensy tiny positive sign… I see some of my progressive friends wanting to give Francis a medal because he’s not quite freakin’ Emperor Palpatine… Um, okay. I guess it’s good some people are recognizing that this Pope is better than the last one. As for me, I’m going to continue to recognize that, except at the finest granularity, this Pope is essentially just as crappy as all the others. (FWIW, I think there is a role for both types of people, i.e. for people like Stephen who applaud even the tiniest improvement in papal shittiness, as well as for people like me who are just like, “Yep, still shitty.”)